Rebecca Humphries is dynamite – pity about the play: Blackout Songs, at Hampstead Theatre, reviewed

Viewers watching a good romcom need to fall in love with three things. The boy, the girl and the affair itself. The new Hampstead melodrama, Blackout Songs, scores just one out of three. Rebecca Humphries is adorably chic and sexy as the Soho seductress who drifts from bar to bar, picking up men. Her toyboy is a disappointment, a teenage deadbeat who has none of her louche gusto. And his character is a puzzle when it ought to be crystal clear.

At the start of the action he wears a neck-brace and speaks with a stammer. In the next scene, his neck has healed and his stammer has vanished as well. Is he two characters? Or is he a con man who assumes different personalities, and if so why? He dresses in a paint-spattered tracksuit but he claims to be a welder, a rock star and a fine artist. Which is it? And he lives in a squat. Or does he? It’s pointless following a character who may turn out to be someone else. And the script lazily refers to the lovers as Him and Her. A wise dramatist uses names to send vital information about the background of his characters. It’s silly to discard such a useful tool.

The Him/Her affair consists of boozing, banal chit-chat and strange role play. The boy claims to have a broken tooth and the girl pretends to remove the troublesome fang with utensils from a kitchen drawer but it’s difficult to know if the extraction is real or not. And performing dental operations in a squat is hardly romantic. Occasionally, a flash of wit appears. She lives by the motto ‘Stay single, drink doubles’. And she mentions a friend with a stammer who died in jail. ‘He didn’t finish his sentence.’ Those are the only lines worth retaining from this shapeless, slapdash script.

The fundamental reason for its failure is the absence of obstacles to the affair. Romances are hard to dramatise because it’s tedious to watch a happy couple getting all lovey-dovey together. Everything changes if the partners must overcome external threats to their union. This trusty device works for Romeo and Juliet and for countless other tales of forbidden love. But the play can’t even reach that basic level of corniness. It’s like listening to the couple next door having a drunken row for 90 minutes. You wish they’d hurry up and stop but you don’t know when they will. It’s strange that Hampstead has staged a romcom by someone who doesn’t know how to write one. At curtain fall, however, the audience went absolutely wild. Their howls of rapture were audible in the street outside. But it’s unlikely they were applauding the dialogue or the character of the deadbeat male. It was Rebecca Humphries, with her rangy drawl and foxy fur-trimmed coat, who triggered the ecstasies of acclaim. Deservedly so. She’s dynamite. One day she’ll appear in a romcom that works.

From Here To Eternity (lyrics by Tim Rice) has received its first London revival since it opened here in 2013. This war-time yarn, more than 80 years old, follows two love affairs that take place in Pearl Harbor during the weeks before the Japanese attack in 1941. The script focuses on the macho, swaggering atmosphere of the US barracks where bullying officers stride about, barking orders at underlings, and competing for promotion.

The romances are almost an afterthought, and the female characters seem like playthings or trophies. Only one powerful woman, Mrs Kipfer, has the guts to hold her own against the strutting alpha males. Desmonda Cathabel plays a pliable young hooker, Lorene, who works in a brothel where she’s obliged to satisfy every client, lightning-quick, in just three minutes. But she doesn’t raise a peep of protest over this gruesome rule. And she seems curiously lukewarm about the amorous cadet, Prewitt, who wants to buy her freedom and save her from her squalid trade.

We follow a second lover, Karen, a blonde sex bomb, who longs to quit her loveless marriage and walk off into the sunset with a handsome junior officer. These romances aren’t well integrated with each other and both females are far too drippy and passive to excite our sympathy. And the conclusion of Prewitt’s story is deeply anti-climactic. A change of ending might have helped.

The show is handsomely presented on a small stage with imaginative sets designed by Steward J. Charlesworth. The music by Stuart Brayson includes several hummable tunes, and Tim Rice’s lyrics are dependably witty and inventive. But great lyrics are not enough to propel a show into the stratosphere. And the Brayson/Rice partnership hasn’t the mischief, freedom and energy of Rice’s work with Andrew Lloyd Webber. Surely they can deliver one more hit before they take their bows. It’s time to get the boys back together again.